My Top Ten Movies of All Time

1. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (five stars total) Allow me to reintroduce you to one of my oldest and dearest friends. He/she may be a fictional character but I've known him/her since I was three years old. According to a line in the movie, "he's a boy" - the Elliott character (Henry Thomas) being an expert on alien anatomy and all. There's another line in the movie where Elliott asserts that to "beam up" (like in Star Trek) isn't reality, but E.T. is. He's more real to me than blood relatives I've never met and next-door neighbors I hear sometimes but almost never see. My wife gave me the Ultimate Gift DVD box set for my birthday the first year we were dating and in the enclosed collectible book, From Concept to Classic, it explains that E.T. is a plant. When I was a kid, I read an adaptation that further explained he's hundreds of years old but still a child on his own planet, and that makes sense if you think of the lifespan of trees. All this makes for a more flexible and universal metaphor. Despite his healing touch and resurrection, I don't see E.T. as a messiah type. He's me and you and everyone else that we know, neither masculine nor feminine exactly, both young and old (from different perspectives), an insider but an outsider too, simultaneously ignorant (to the ways of our world) and wise (to know who to trust and how to empower them), at one with nature while still technologically advanced and last but not least, short or tall (depending on his neck). I could go on and on but I've already filled my quota for run-on sentences and this review's not even halfway done.The movie hooks me from the opening credits - plain font, black background and scary music. It piques curiousity by creating mystery where there is none and gives time for any audience to transition from whatever they were doing before. There's no exposition about where we are (some hillside at night), what we're seeing (does the creature looking down on the town like it or want to attack it?) or why men with lots of keys are in pursuit (we do know they're bad because we only see them from the waist down). In monster movies, the earlier a monster is shown, the less threatening it becomes. We know E.T. is good, not because the movie's named after him (Alien was still fresh in audiences' minds during E.T.'s original theatrical run), not through cue cards or dialogue but through images (these creatures are the only ones to appear from head to toe at first). And what spectacular images they are! Words can't describe the glowing mushrooms in a spaceship greenhouse, the hand-me-down props from The Day of the Triffids (1962), the redwood forest outside Culver City in northern California and BMX bikes flying over the police cars at the end (foreshadowed by the Peter Pan bedtime story earlier on). At first Elliott talks to E.T. like you would a baby or a dog, but soon their telepathic connection erases the need for words. Essentially we're watching the story of a boy and his dog, which precludes a lot of dialogue in favor of visual storytelling. Some people claim that E.T. is a reverse Wizard of Oz, but I'll take my last statement a step further and suggest that it's a reverse boy-and-his-dog story, where Elliott is the dog character who saves the day by helping a higher intelligence find his way home.

But wait! After nobody speaks for the first eight minutes (think WALL-E), suddenly there's dialogue everywhere. And it overlaps enough during the Dungeons and Dragons game/kitchen table scene that it could be Robert Altman movie. The sound was so bad on the VHS copy I had growing up that I couldn't understand what anyone was talking about. That's okay though, because none of it is essential to the plot and therein lies the secret to its realism. Kids swear like adults (the '80s loved the sh-word), make obscene gestures behind their mother's back and order pizza without permission - just like in real life. Later on, the Michael character (Robert MacNaughton) comes home from football practice and immediately raids the refrigerator, singing an Elvis Costello song but changing the words to complain about health food - just like a real teenager. One of Michael's friends calls Elliott a "cintus suprimus," which I finally looked up after close to 30 years of wondering what it meant. Turns out it means nothing, not literally anyway. It's just kids being kids, putting Latin words together to sound smart. Watching the movie as an adult, I'm ashamed to say I can relate more to the older teens and their annoyance at the squeaky-voiced Elliott. He's not a perfect protagonist. He joins his older brother in teasing their sister, Gertie (Drew Barrymore), but we gain sympathy for E.T. through this scene because of how it makes him sad. Don't let anybody tell you that little kids can't act, because Elliott does a mean Count Dracula impersonation in that same teasing scene and Michael provides comic relief in the voice of Yoda throughout the movie. Lastly, those are real tears when Gertie sees E.T. in the incubator and those are real doctors in the background - no acting on anyone's part. Not even director Steven Spielberg knew what the doctors were saying - that was the whole point.

Speaking of Spielberg, I feel I should mention that I liked him a lot better as a kid. Sure, I love Jaws (1975), Hook (1991) and Minority Report (2002) as much as the next person, but I absolutely hate Jurassic Park (1993), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Even as a kid I was confused by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Always (1989) and it took me over five years to work my way up to both Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) after each was released. I have yet to see and may never see The Color Purple (1985) and Munich (2005), not because I'm against heavy topics but because I feel no connection. E.T. has to be the easiest of all Spielberg's movies to connect with. It has its heavy topics but none of them are presented up front. Thematically, it's about how kids deal with separation, either from divorce, death or just moving away - things that adults deal with too. However, the divorce is in the background, the death turns out to be falsely reported and the move leaves a rainbow in its wake. What's more important than any of its themes though is its style and context. When Spielberg showed clips playing on the TV from This Island Earth (1955), Sesame Street (1969) and The Quiet Man (1952), he was not only connecting his own movie with others (in terms of genre and craftsmanship), he was putting his own childhood in perspective. You see, he was paying his respects to the special effects-laden science fiction that he'd grown up with and was now making himself. By including a children's show he himself hadn't grown up with, he was recognizing a new generation and trying to connect with it. They say that if you have to quote somebody, you might as well quote from the best, so he chose director John Ford and one of his non-western John Wayne movies about a stranger in a strange land. All this goes to show that even if Spielberg isn't the greatest director ever to live, he's humble enough not to claim to be within his own work.

Below are the rest my top ten favorite movies of all time. If I was stuck on a desert island with food, shelter and a solar-powered portable DVD player, but I could only have ten DVDs, these are the ones that I would choose. Most of them are my number one picks for various genres. Half of them make me laugh and half can make me cry. A few of them display some serious tension while most feature romance. Some are sentimental from childhood but the rest inform my future. There are 120 significant movies from my lifetime listed on the right sidebar. I haven't seen all of them and I'm not sure I would want to rewatch all the those that I have seen. I know people who never rewatch movies as a rule, but I think they might if they were stuck alone on a desert island. Each of the following movies leaves room to breathe and conversely, they're packed with details you might miss the first time around. More than any other movies I've ever seen, I'm willing to rewatch these again and again:

2. Airborne (1993) see my top five list for teen movies (10/20/08)

3. Children of Men (2006) see my top ten list for suspense/thrillers (9/29/08)

4. Where the River Runs Black (1986) see my top ten list for drama (3/9/09)

5. The Kid (1921)

6. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) see my top ten list for animation (11/10/08)

7. Groundhog Day (1993) see my top ten list for comedy (2/9/09)

8. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) see my tracklisting for the never-released soundtrack (12/16/08)

9. Gattaca (1997) see my top ten list for sci-fi/fantasy (4/20/09)

10. I know I'm cheating, but it's a tie: Babes in Toyland and The Parent Trap (both 1961) see my top ten list for children's movies (10/27/08)

Too Long?

The Dark Knight (five stars total) My wife says my blog posts are too long, which is fine by me. Some people say The Dark Knight was too long, and I'm okay with that too. Last night I rewatched it so that it will be fresh in my mind when I go see Watchmen. This former clocks in at two and a half hours and the latter is even ten minutes longer. My wife and I are of the European opinion that no movie REALLY needs to go over 90 minutes, but I understand that we live in America where two hours is the average and people here are ready and willing to shell out for extended edition director's cut DVDs on top of that. Truth be told, I don't agree that The Dark Knight was too long, but in order to streamline it with the two-hour average, I watched last night for a half hour's worth of scenes that could be cut without affecting the plot. There are ten main characters that all have scenes where they meet or follow-up with each other, so those are necessary for character development (the numbers below are for the DVD chapters, in the order that the characters first appear):

The Joker with Gordon (22), Batman (13), Harvey (29), Rachel (13), Lau and the Mob (6)
Gordon with Ramirez (2), Batman (3), Harvey (4), Lau and the Mob (10)
Ramirez with Batman (2), Harvey (32) and Rachel (22?)
Batman with Alfred (3), Harvey (7), Rachel (13), Fox (4), Lau (9) and the Mob (17)
Alfred with Harvey and Rachel (5)
Rachel with the Mob (4) and Lau (10)
Harvey with Rachel and the Mob (4), Lau (20?)

In chronological order, those character development scenes would be 2-7, 10, 13, 17, 20, 22, 29, and 32, but that doesn't mean that all the other scenes are expendable. At two to five minutes each, you would only need to come up with six to eight scenes to cut to bring the movie down to two hours and there's 25 chapters left on the DVD to choose from. There's some redundancy in the "why so serious?" scene (8) because the Joker's already met with the Mob and then he meets with them again in the "better class of criminal" scene (27), but at least that one resolves the conflict there. As much as I like the "your plan is blackmail?" scene (15), the Reese character is not essential to the overall storyline, and editing him out takes care of another scene too (28). I think the car chase sequence is perfectly tense throughout, but it does take Batman a while to show up, so the "trip to county" scene (20) could be trimmed. Lastly, I understand the political points the filmmakers were trying to make with the "too much power" (31) and "ferry scary" (33, 35) scenes, but plot-wise, those were just distractions from the Two-Face arc and could be trimmed in favor of a shorter (but less meaningful) Joker diversion.

I heard a lot of people say the Two-Face subplot felt tacked-on and unessential, but upon watching The Dark Knight for this third time, I realized that the title refers not just to one of Batman's many nicknames, but to the contrast between Gotham City's "shining knight" in Harvey/Two-Face, and "the hero that the city deserves," which is Batman, innocently taking the blame for five deaths. Therefore, the unedited Two-Face plot is absolutely essential to the very title of the movie, and the Joker's bomb threats on the hospitals and the boats are merely peripheral to his character's primary plot contribution, which is bringing down Harvey to bring down Gotham City (and inadvertently creating Two-Face). This leads to what I consider the most meaningful theme of the movie: the different "faces of evil" (which is concurrently a big event in Batman's comic book series). There are at least five types of criminals to compare and contrast, each with their own motives, effects, and influences:

The Mob - parasites; working outside the system but dependent on it; lawful evil (to borrow a term from D&D)
Lau - legitimate crooks; bankers, lawyers, and politicians working within the system; neutral evil
The Joker - terrorists; intentionally working against the system; chaotic evil
Harvey/Two-Face - apostates and fallen heroes; actually doing the most damage to the system
Batman - yes, even Batman, the titular character, is a criminal because he works outside the law

Human Interest Story

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (five stars total) is the first five star film that I've reviewed here. That's not to say it's the first five star film I've seen, but it is just as complex, dark, haunting, thrilling and well-crafted as The Dark Knight, which was the last five star film I saw. Granted, Brad Pitt is my favorite character actor next to Johnny Depp, but I've never much cared for Cate Blanchett's performances, and I loved her here. My favorite things in film are cutaways and inserts, especially when they're comical and/or surreal. The guy being struck by lightning seven times counts for both. I walked in late to the screening, started up the stairs for the stadium seating, and had to sit down on the top step because I couldn't see in the dark to find a seat. A guy on the aisle moved over and whispered for me to sit next to him. I'll agree, there's nothing spectacular or halfway provocative about that story, but I share it here because it sums up my experience with Button. It's all about humanity and subtlety. Theatrical trailers tried to make the film look like another special effects vehicle, but there's nothing spectacular aside from the how obvious and practical it is. Fans of David Fincher's past work in Se7en and Fight Club tried to make the film sound like another scarring and shadowy work by the director, but there's nothing provocative about all the death aside from how natural and ordinary it is. The story is simple yet thoughtful. I heard someone complaining afterwards about the length, but I appreciated the time to think. Consider the parallels between youth and old age, what turns a boy into a man, and being able to tell exactly how many years you have left to live (barring accidental death or terminal disease). The music score reminded me of the Bach piece above, which I first heard on the trailer for a Robert Downey Jr./Jamie Foxx film, The Soloist (out in April). The soundtrack goes from Scott Joplin to Louis Armstrong and The Platters to The Beatles. If I could only recommend the film for one reason, it surprisingly would not be for my favorite editing technique, or the Oscar-winning special effects, not even the music. It would be for the emotion. I had one of those cries that clenches your stomach and makes your face feel weightless from draining tears. There's real sadness in the film, but it's not depressing or sappy. It's unfortunate that I missed the beginning, so could someone please explain the clock to me?